Tyrannia (19 page)

“Right, but it killed you,” I say between sips. The water is pesky and it’s hard to get a lot of it into my mouth. But I get enough.

“We’re not in that world anymore.”

“Which world is this, then?” I feel both lucky and guilty that I get to ask some follow-up questions.

“The one that I was trying to pretend I didn’t know existed. The one that I was killed for, because I knew about it.”

I stumble to my feet toward the swimming pool. I’ve always tried to operate within the strictures of the laws given to me, which I admit have cast a pretty wide net.

Doing otherwise was never part of my employment profile.

On the other hand, I’m unemployed now.

The warden’s body isn’t in the swimming pool anymore. But there’s a long knife floating on the surface, like a leaf. I bend down and pluck it out. My hand takes to it. There is a straight-and-narrow trough, about a hand’s width, that I haven’t noticed before. Azure tiles run along its sides. There are three other troughs, and they all divide the backyard into quadrants. Mudpuppies of rust stare at me as I walk past. Their eyes are white.

The sprinkler stops. It’s done its share to wet the grass. I want to cry about how peaceful the night is. I’m walking on the grass blades toward the woods. My strides grow longer. There really isn’t any way to explain this. I put the knife between my teeth and sail forward through the air. One of the little men meets me in mid-flight and tries to get a handhold on my body. I move my body sideways, as if I have no depth at all.

“The jinn come from the mudpuppies!” Amanda calls out from below me, cupping her hands. The bruises on her face are gone. Then she says something in French. Her homeland is gone. “I mean, the mudpuppies are incubators for the jinn. The people who made this world try to control them. But . . . they have minds of their own.”

“Got it,” I call down to her. The jinn lands, and leaps back toward me. “I should have taken your condition more seriously,” I say to her as I land and pivot.

“Ah, well . . .” she says. Then she jumps up toward me and embraces my body. I worry that she’s going to drag me down, but she doesn’t. “I wasn’t honest,” she says. “Those kids died because of me. I knew someone was going to try to steal the Game Boy, so I poisoned the start button. Then I just . . . panicked, and gave it away to these two kids who were milling about.”

“Why . . . why was it so important to begin with?”

“It’s not the Game Boy itself. It’s the game cartridge that was in it. The Saudis had a covert program, where they wanted to upload suicide bombers to a virtual paradise. They were to present this as a ‘gift’ to Hamas—but when Hezbollah and Hamas started attacking each other . . .” I feel her shoulders twitch. Time can slow for any reason. “The Saudis abandoned it. Anyway, it’s the same technology that lets you become a ghost. Except, with this game . . . it has a neural link, see? And people equipped with the right link themselves can access this place at any time. This game was the prototype for mass production. But then I stole it. And things got out of control.”

“You weren’t in a great spot to begin with,” I say. I see, behind me, the jinn spring through the air. He has a black blade hoisted in both of his hands above his head. “Who was trying to kill you, Amanda?”

Amanda closes her eyes. “God is behind everything,” she says, letting go of me and settling back to earth, “and yet has no capability to alter our circumstances. Having that capability—to be inside of us through even the smallest manifestation—would destroy everything we hold dear.” She wipes her nose with her sleeve. “At least that’s what I’ve heard.”

“I really couldn’t say,” I say, as I jump upward, arcing the knife in front of me. The knives clang and mine rattles down, slicing the shoulder of the jinn. He screams and plummets.

“But things didn’t go as they planned, exactly. I mean, I’m dead, but I’m here. And the jinn keep hatching. No one really controls it anymore. People are trying to control it, but . . . It’s not really God’s fault that I’m dead,” Amanda says. “Whose fucking fault is that?”

“I don’t know, our Coalition of Interested Forces? Me?”

“Well, you know, your government resuscitated the garden. It was a cultural exchange program with the Saudis when they started training Christian suicide bombers alongside the Sunni ones. I swear, Jackson, one day this is all going to be washed away.”

“Like my guilt?” I say. Because I’m beginning to feel guilty.

“Well,” she says, “let’s not get carried away.”

Knowing that, I want to comfort the jinn, but he is gone, and his blood trail is lost in the slick grass. I slide to the ground and take toward the woods, following the water trough. I don’t look back to Amanda for anything. I still don’t know who she works for—or worked for—and what she intends to do, now that she is stuck in the garden that she wanted to destroy. The trees in the woods are slender, spaced in measured proportion, and the grass thins. Feathery conifers. There is an angular trail.

I see, farther off through the trees, the gendarme who blew himself up—though he really wasn’t a gendarme—shoot a kid in the face.

“Hey!” I say, running toward them, winding through trees. “Hey!” The kid falls back and drops the Game Boy. When I get closer I see that the other boy is also on the ground, twitching, poisoned. The gendarme moves to pick up the Game Boy, paying me no mind. Because I am still far away, I throw my knife at his hand, which slices it off. He doesn’t scream—why should he?—but instead throws his gun at me. The gun slices off my right hand.

“You know,” I say, feeling nothing except an itch inside my other hand, “that is really not fair.” I pick up my hand off the forest floor and after stuffing it into my pocket, pick up the gun. When I reach the cop, he is hunched over the Game Boy, trying to balance it against his knee and start it up.

“There’s no game in there,” the shot boy says, sitting up. A gosling sleeps in his caved-in skull. “I threw it over the roof.”

The cop shushes him. “Do you mind? I’m trying to get this thing to work.”

“Into the water treatment pool,” the boy continues. “There are a lot of fish that live in there. I was hoping one of them would eat it. And then one of them did!”

At this the cop closes the Game Boy and looks at the boy. “Who ate it?” His severed hand lunges toward my face, but my own hand flies out of my pocket and meets it in mid-air. They spar, fingernails clicking.

“A white carp, big as me!”

Then the cop lunges at the kid, but the other kid wraps his arms around the cop’s legs. He falls over.

“Who do you work for?” the kid says, pounding his fists against the cop’s back. “Who do you work for?”

I pluck the Game Boy from the ground and keep walking. From the stump of my severed hand grows a clutch of blue peonies. The stems tickle. I move in further. There are geese sleeping underneath the trees, but I don’t want to disturb them. I walk for about ten minutes or so until I reach the wall. It’s too high to climb. The trough ends at the wall at a little groove, where the water trickles to the other side. I crouch down and try to see what’s there, but no luck. I put my good hand into the water and try to feel where the water goes, but I’m only able to squeeze three fingers in. Then I feel someone else’s hand on the other side. We fumble around for a second in the cold water and then we both retract. I press against the wall and listen, and hear breathing.

He makes the first move, though, the first recognition. “Jackson?” he says.

“Holland? Oh my God, where are you? Are you all right?” I say.

“Yeah, I’m all right. Really.” His voice is on the faint side.

“Uh, where are you again?” I ask.

“Right next to you. Just a little farther out. In the desert.”

“Right.” I want to figure out what to say to him. There were so many times we found ourselves in war zones, trying to inflict policy on strangers. We never had the chance to test our partnership. And now that partnership is over.

“I can’t talk long . . .” he says.

“So . . . how are you?”

“Oh, pretty good,” he says. “I’ve been wandering the desert a lot. Writing poetry.”

“Poetry?”

“Sure. Do you want to hear one? It’s short.”

“Okay,” I say, studying my flowered hand.

The heart’s falcon flutters over the blotter

A forced battle does not crown a victor

Innocent amusements are found wanting

The sparrow glides in terror

“I like it,” I say. “I don’t know too much about poetry, though, I have to admit.”

“It’s a struggle,” he says. “But thanks.”

I want to bring us back to the matters at hand, before they completely slip away from us. “They’re going to torture me, Holland. When I wake up. They’re going to send me to Nome and interrogate me about the garden—”

“Yeah, about that . . . Here, take this.” He lets go of my hand and pushes a game cartridge through the watered slot. I pick it up. The plastic is fog gray and it’s a bit heavier than what I would have expected. There’s a small pearl eyelet mounted on the wider edge of the cartridge.

“It’s wet.”

“Doesn’t matter. It’ll still play. You have the Game Boy, right?”

“Yeah. Where . . . where did you get this?”

“I got it from the mouth of great trouble. But, listen, don’t play the game until you’re ready. Okay? Promise me that?”

“I promise.”

“You sure? You might not be able to go back.”

“I said I promised, Holland. Jesus.”

And this, at least, gets a laugh from him. “Okay. Okay. Do you remember how we were recruited, back in the day?”

“A little.”

“We were failures at the police academy, Jackson. I mean, we were at different academies, but same difference. Why were we chosen to be ghosts?”

“Because we were bullies and horrible detectives who thought we were great detectives,” I say.

“Okay. Close enough. We never really detected anything, did we?”

“Not really. But how about now?”

“It might be a little too late for that. I have to go now.”

I know I’m never going to speak to him again. “Holland! I can jump to the other side!”

“You can’t.”

I’m not even sure if I want to. But I put the cartridge in my coat pocket and try to leap up over it. It doesn’t look that high. I go about twenty, then thirty feet up, and the wall’s edge is just beyond reach.

“I told you,” Holland says after I land, trying to catch my breath. “It’s okay. You’re not ready to go outside the garden. Look, just watch what you see, and you’ll be all right.”

“Watch what I see,” I say, with disbelief, as if the conversation is finally catching up to me. But then he’s gone.

I lean up against the wall again and hear birds rustling and chirping on the other side. I close my eyes. When I open them, I see a little paper boat coming toward me in the trough, from the direction of the swimming pool. The jinn is inside. I move out of the way of the miniature canal. His arm isn’t as badly damaged as I thought it would have been. I smell ginger and incense. His paper boat has a stiff sail, but when he gets closer to the grooved opening in the wall, he scurries to collapse and lower the mast. As he passes, we look at each other, but I can’t tell, for the life of me, what he’s thinking. He manages to lower the sail in the nick of time and then, so he doesn’t get decapitated going under the notch in the trough—which is rather low—he lays down in his boat and crosses his arms on his chest, like a vampire leaving paradise.

I then realize that the cartridge that Holland has given me will not be there when I wake up. Nor the Game Boy.

Because they are not real.

The moon is so bright. It’s not asking a thing of me. I put the cartridge in the Game Boy and press START. I sit and wait against the stone wall for about a month. Frogs sit in my lap and lumber away. Geese land on my shoulders and sleep, and depart again. Bees pollinate my peonies, and die, and the descendants of those bees come back to the hand. I’m waiting for the moon to turn new, to vanish. When it does, and I can’t see anything, not even a single flower in front of my face, I have a conversion. In the darkness I’m shot through with a joy that I don’t deserve.

But as to what I’m converting to, that will always remain a mystery.

The Wildfires of Antarctica

I loaned Roxy: Shark * Flower to the Antarctica Institute
for the Arts because I wanted a better life for her; at the same time, it soon became apparent that the same problems that vexed me in regards to her behavior would trouble the museum. Although she was out of my hands I still carried an interest in her well-being, as well as an aesthetic sense of pride, and an interest in whether her time in the museum would appreciate her value.

Was it punitive on my part? I suppose it was. But she was the one who threw everything away.
Roxy
once had everything she ever wanted: protection from thieves, food.

There are many others like her in the museum—though no two alike; that indeed could be a journeyman’s definition of art—and I was assured there would be opportunities for supervised interactions with other objets d’art with her same level of genetic provenance. And no expense would be spared in her preservation. Her display case contained the ambient full-spectrum lights that she needed for the chrysanthemums and poppies and amaranths to grow along the seams of her arms.
Roxy
would not be able to harm herself or others with her serrated molars, since they were capped; when they shed, the cap would grow with the new tooth. (The museum and I agreed to a 50/50 split on residuals for the aftermarket sale for the teeth no longer in her mouth, for the scrimshaw of majestic oaks the artist had encoded there.) A daily spore spritz-and-dry would keep her hair—coarse on her crown and spine, ultra-fine on her arms and legs—from losing its luminous sheen.

And of course the museum gave me the opportunity to watch her every hour of the day. The surveillance bees would always be with her. I was a busy man, but I rarely left the villa, so I often checked on
Roxy
throughout my day. It soothed my soul.